Falcon could see Sly blinking back tears. "Good," she said huskily. "Good."

"I'm not afraid, Sharon Louise." Modal's voice had a terrible bubbling tone to it. "I'm not afraid, and I'm not sad. I should be, don't you think? Isn't that part of it, after all?" He took a breath as if to say something else. But a sharp spasm convulsed his body, and the air hissed wordlessly from his lungs.

That's two. The thought was enough to chill Falcon to the marrow. Two people dead, dying in my arms like the old fragging cliche'. How many more before this is fragging over?

PART 3..

Out of the Bucket.

19.

0850 hours, November 14, 2053.

They were alone now, just Sly and the kid Falcon. T. S. had offered to help her out, to see her through this, more for old times' sake than anything. Though Theresa had tried to hide it. Sly knew she was relieved when Sly refused the offer.

Smeland had driven her to a particularly unpleasant part of south Redmond, where she claimed to have a good place to hole up until things settled down ... if they ever did. When T. S. pulled up at the curb, Sly was searching for the words to ask the last big favor she needed from her chummer. Fortunately for her, T. S. beat her to it.

"You can have the car," Theresa said quietly. "It'll be hot. Whoever those gunners were will have the tag number. They'll get the word out, but it should be able to get you far enough to boost another ride.

"And I can handle . . . him," she said, indicating Modal with a jerk of her head. "I've got friends who can take care of it."

Sly nodded wordlessly, not knowing what she would have done with the body. She wouldn't have wanted to just dump Modal's lifeless form, but what other choice would she have had? She was relieved when Smeland solved the problem for her.

Smeland's destination turned out to be an ork "hall," an old store that had been "remodeled" into communal housing. Theresa had gone into the building, to emerge a couple of minutes later accompanied by three burly male orks. All three were wearing gang-style leathers, but Sly didn't recognize the colors. (He probably knows, she thought, with a glance at Falcon, but didn't bother to ask.) The orks opened the back door and dragged Modal's carca.s.s out. Totally unconcerned about the other people on the street, mostly orks, the biggest of the three had slung the elf's b.l.o.o.d.y body over his shoulder, then carried it into the hall. Sly was looking around nervously, waiting for some bystander to react, to interfere, maybe to run off to call Lone Star. But, if anything, the general reaction was complacency, if not utter boredom. And that, she thought, is about the scariest comment on the Barrens that anyone could make.

Another of the orks had climbed into the back seat with a towel to wipe away the worst of the blood. After tossing the soaked cloth out to his chummers, he spread another piece of fabric-almost like a dropcloth-over the stains.

And that had been that. He bared his chipped fangs at Sly in a quick grin, then he and his "stymates" disappeared back inside the hall.

To Sly's mixed disappointment and relief, Smeland had not reappeared. No goodbyes, no temptation to tell T. S. something that might get her greased. Sly gestured for the kid to join her in the front seat, then got behind the wheel and pulled away. She rolled down a window, hoping the wind of their speed would dilute the cloying smell of blood and death.

She knew they had to ditch the car, ditch it and steal another one.

But then what? The question was doubly chilling because she didn't have a good answer. Hole up and wait for everything to blow over?

But it wouldn't blow over, would it? The corp war would start. And eventually, someone would track down Sharon Louise Young, torture her until they knew everything she did, and then kill her. Sooner or later it would happen, no matter how deep into the shadows she tried to hide. Sooner or later someone would get lucky . . . and probably sooner rather than later. So what other options did she have?

She glanced down at the cyberdeck lying on the front seat beside Falcon. The kid had rescued it from Smeland's place while Sly had been in a daze of dump shock. And a fragging good thing he had. The optical chip containing the lost tech datafile was in the deck's chip slot.

Maybe I should cut a deal with Jurgensen, she reflected. Some of his arguments made sense. The UCAS military definitely had the resources to protect her from the corps. If they stuck by their agreements, she amended silently. And if they don't geek me themselves, just to keep the fact that they've got the tech secret.

Trust. It all came down to trust. How far did she trust Jurgensen? Did she trust him to keep his word? To keep her alive? To use the tech in ways that didn't destabilize the whole fragging continent?

No, she thought, with a pang of physical pain. I don't trust him. How can I?

So what did that leave? Hadn't she just eliminated all her alternatives?

Sly shook her head slightly, struggled to enforce a brittle sense of calm. Deal with the immediate, she told herself, worry about the eventual later. At the moment, the immediate involved getting another vehicle.

And Falcon. She turned to the Amerindian. "Where do you want me to drop you?" she asked His head jerked around. "Huh?"

"I'll drop you off somewhere," she said patiently. "Where?"

He was silent for a moment, but she could almost feel his racing thoughts. "No," the kid said at last, his voice little more than a whisper. There was fear in his eyes as he looked into her face, but his expression was set, determined. "Nowhere."

Sly wanted to rage at him, but forced herself to speak calmly. "This isn't your game."

"Maybe it is."

"Why?"

Sly watched his face, saw from his expression that he had an answer. She could also see just as clearly that he was struggling hard to formulate it in words she could understand-that he could understand. She didn't push, but didn't give him an easy out either. Let him figure it out, she told herself.

After more than a minute, he shrugged. "It's my choice," he said quietly, evenly. "It's my life, I can do with it what I want."

"It's my life, too, chummer."

He nodded in acknowledgment. "If you want to get rid of me, you make the call, you say so. But unless you've got a good reason, I want to stay in."

It was her turn to think it through. She pulled the Ford over to the side of the road, put the car in neutral. She stared into the young Amerind's face, into his eyes, but she couldn't read this kid. There was fear there, but it was mixed with many other emotions. Plenty of determination too.

"What are you going to do?" he asked her.

That was the question, wasn't it? "I don't know yet," Sly admitted. "What do you think I should do?"

"Get out of the plex," he answered immediately. "All this corp drek is limited to Seattle, to the UCAS, isn't it?"

"For the moment."

"So get out," he repeated. "Slip the border, go someplace quieter. Give yourself time-give us time-to figure out our next move. And if you're planning to handle it with this"-he patted the cyberdeck-"you can do it from anywhere, right? So why be a fish in a bucket when you can get out of the fragging bucket?"

From the expression on the kid's face, a tinge of embarra.s.sment overlaying his earnestness, she knew the a.n.a.logy wasn't his, was probably something he'd heard on the trideo. But it hit home all the same.

Why not get out of the bucket?

"Where would you go?" she asked slowly.

"Sioux Nation." Again he answered at once, as if he'd figured it all out some time ago. "Fewer corps, less drek going on behind the scenes. The Council of Chiefs keeps tight control over that kind of thing."

That's not what I've heard, Sly thought. But . . . "You've been there, then?"

Again that tinge of embarra.s.sment crossed the kid's face. "No," he admitted unwillingly, "but I know about it. It's a good place."

Maybe. She couldn't be sure how much of the Amerindian's enthusiasm was based on fact and how much on sentimental fantasies.

But there was still something in his suggestion. Getting out of the plex-out of the bucket-did sound like a good idea. The obvious choice was the Salish-Shidhe Council, because it involved crossing only one border. Wasn't avoiding needless complexity one of the first rules of any operation?

Still, S-S might not be the best choice. No matter how vociferously the intertribal council denied it, events in Seattle had a big effect on what went down in S-S territory. As the corp war continued to heat up, the news would leak into the Salish-Shidhe nation first. It was highly likely that any megacorps with a presence in S-S were already maneuvering as actively as they were in downtown Seattle.

So where else? Tir Tairngire? Forget it. The corps had almost no presence in the elven nation; the elves wouldn't let them in, pure and simple. But the same territorial paranoia and isolationism that kept the megacorps out meant that the Tir borders were even harder to penetrate than those of the Pueblo Corporate Council-and that was saying something. What difference would it make to her if she got geeked by a corp hit team or a Tir border patrol? Dead was dead.

Tsimshian? Strange things were happening up there. Both the shadow buzz and the newsfaxes agreed on that. Apparently some faction-the Haida National Liberation Army or some such overblown drek-was trying to overthrow the government-again. Jumping into the middle of civil unrest and retaliatory repression didn't seem like such a swift move.

So that left the Sioux and Ute nations, if she wanted to deal with the minimum number of illegal border crossings. To be honest, Sly didn't know enough about either place to make an intelligent choice. So why not go with the kid's hunch?

"Where in Sioux would you go?" she asked.

"Cheyenne, I guess. It's the capital, the biggest city." He grinned-a real grin, not something faked to cover his fear. "More shadows to hide in, right?"

What the frag, anyway? "Why not," she said, a statement rather than a question.

"I'm coming along, right?" he asked urgently.

Who else could she turn to for help? No one.

Sly nodded. "Why not?"

Sly stopped the car in the alley behind Agarwal's house, beside the wide ramp leading down to the ex-decker's garage/workshop. She killed the engine, started to get out.

"Why are we stopping here?" Falcon asked.

"We need another car," she explained.

"We can get one here?"

She smiled at the kid's doubting tone. "You better believe it," she told him. "And if we're lucky we can get some fake datawork to pa.s.s us through the border checkpoints." She swung out of the car. "Wait here, I'll be back. . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"What is it?"

She stared at the back of the old church. The rear door was open a crack. A cold tingle of apprehension shot through her. She reached under her coat, patted the b.u.t.t of her revolver in its holster. "Stay here," she told him.

"Frag that." The Amerindian clambered out of the car, flipping the safety off the machine pistol he carried. He slung the strap of Smeland's cyberdeck over his shoulder.

For a moment she considered ordering him to stay with the car. But what authority did she have anyway? As much as he wanted to give her, no more. So why push it over something that didn't really matter? And anyway, an extra gun couldn't hurt.

She led the way up the steps to the door. They stopped for a moment while she listened.

Nothing from inside the building. With the toe of her boot she swung the door open slowly, let it b.u.mp against the wall. Drawing her pistol, she stepped inside.

From what Sly knew of Agarwal's security system, her weight on the floor should have triggered some kind of alarm even if the door were open. That implied that all the interlocking systems were probably down. Which, in turn, implied that either Agarwal had turned them off personally, or that whoever had left the door open had managed to defeat some of the most intense security in the plex. Not a rea.s.suring thought.

She stopped again to listen. More silence.

The house felt empty, lifeless. Her apprehension grew, turning to a twisting knot in her belly. Gesturing for Falcon to follow, Sly crept deeper into the house, looking for Agarwal.

She found him in his study, but he was dead, undeniably and messily so. He was sitting upright in his high-backed desk chair, upright because long velcro straps had secured him in that position. One strap around his waist, another around his neck so he couldn't slump forward. One around each forearm, holding them to the chair's arms. Another around his legs, bending them back under the chair and securing them around the swivel pedestal. Someone had cut away his clothes-and then cut away more than just his clothes. His face was slack, expressionless, white as parchment. His eyes were open, because two of the things they'd cut away were his eyelids. Like twisted claws, his hands gripped the ends of the chair arms, the knuckles white as ivory. Under the chair was a plastic drop cloth that someone had spread to catch the blood-and more than blood-that had fallen from their work. It was a meaningless, macabre touch of neatness.

Agarwal had lingered. Sly didn't know how she knew, but she did. They had been professionals, skilled in their craft. He hadn't died quickly.

She closed her eyes, looked away.

Heard a sound behind her. Spun, revolver coming up.

It was Falcon, of course, the sound a choking gag. The youth's eyes bulged, his face almost as white as Agarwal's. He dropped his machine pistol, turned aside. Noisily spewed the contents of his stomach onto Agarwal's expensive carpet.

She turned back to her friend, her mentor. I'm sorry. She mouthed the words silently. So sorry.

I did this. I didn't wield the knife, the pliers, the probes. But I did this to you just the same. Because I came to you for help, before I knew the magnitude, the importance, of the game I'd got myself into.

"Who?" Falcon's voice was a croak, the word forced through a tight, hoa.r.s.e throat.

"I don't know."

The kid wiped his mouth with a sleeve, spat to clear his mouth.

"They're not watching the place," Sly said. If they were, she thought, we'd be dead. Or worse.

"Why not?" he demanded.

"I don't know."

He spat again. "We've got to go. Maybe they'll be back."

"Yes."

But she didn't move. She couldn't leave Agarwal. Not like this. She had to do something. . . .

"We've got to go," Falcon said again.

He was right, she knew. There wasn't anything Sly could do for her friend now.

She forced herself to speak. "Downstairs," she told him. "We'll take one of his cars."

He hesitated.

"Come on," she said, pulling the kid by the arm. "He won't be needing them anymore."